Let’s hope the boffins who track inflation are watching video streaming (and not for the entertainment value!). Netflix today raised the price on its premium tier by $3 a month to $22.99, a notably bigger increase than the last time it jacked up prices. Aggressive price increases are becoming standard in streaming, at least among the bigger companies, as we noted here recently. A few days ago, for instance, Disney... Read more ›
0
Despite TikTok’s immense popularity, it still has work to do to help advertisers and the agencies that make ads understand how to best use the short-form video app.The latest effort to address this: Earlier this month, the ByteDance-owned company invited creative agencies to participate in a program focused on upcoming major sporting events, including the Super Bowl and March Madness, according to an email invitation seen by The Information. Read more ›
1
Nikita Bier has done it again. Nine months after he sold anonymous-compliments app Gas to Discord, the app is being shut down. Bier is known in Silicon Valley as the founder of TBH, another anonymous social app which he sold to Facebook in 2017. In mid-2018, Facebook said it was closing the app “due to low usage.” Bier’s repeat of the feat puts the spotlight on app acquisitions that many... Read more ›
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China’s government has taken a stake in a domestic subsidiary of Tencent, the operator of WeChat, China’s biggest messaging app, in the latest step by Beijing to tighten its control over the country’s big tech firms. The government has taken a similar sized stake in the domestic subsidiaries of several other tech giants over the past few years, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Kuaishou and Weibo. Such an arrangement, known as “special... Read more ›
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Digital trucking marketplace Convoy told employees on Wednesday to stop accepting new orders and said that it was canceling existing shipments, promising to share additional details with staff in the coming days, according to an internal message. The abrupt message comes after months of Convoy exploring strategic options including a potential sale, a process that was first reported by The Information in August. Convoy landed a $3.8 billion valuation in... Read more ›
0
Apple fired at least five employees who worked in the company’s App Store in China following an internal probe into business misconduct, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. Apple found infractions such as unsanctioned contact with mobile game developers or consultants working on their behalf, these people said. An internal audit uncovered irregularities in 2022, prompting an investigation that concluded around the middle of this year, one... Read more ›
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Prosecutors expect to rest their case in the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried next week (after the trial won’t meet for four consecutive business days), setting up the defense’s opportunity to persuade jurors they should not convict him on any of the seven fraud and conspiracy charges he faces.The case was already an uphill battle for Bankman-Fried and his defense team, led by Mark Cohen of the law firm Cohen... Read more ›
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We are 14 months out from our first ‘AI’ presidential election. Everyone knows that this is going to be a misinformation disaster. How bad will it be? This cycle is going to make 2016’s issues with “Russian bot farms” look downright quaint. Unlike the techno-fever-dream of the risk posed by Artificial General Intelligence, even today’s “crude” AI is a clear and present danger in its ability to destroy trust in... Read more ›
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It seems like Silicon Valley’s golden child isn’t perfect after all. In a rare moment of weakness, large-language model developer OpenAI scrapped a new model, codenamed Arrakis, in mid-2023 that would have helped it run its popular chatbot ChatGPT more cheaply, my colleagues Jon Victor and Aaron Holmes reported on Tuesday.OpenAI researchers hoped to use a machine-learning concept called sparsity to help the new model run more efficiently. To create... Read more ›
0
Amazon is approaching brands that already buy search ads on its e-commerce website with an unusual pitch: if you buy streaming TV ads, we’ll make them for you. The incentive highlights the lengths Amazon is willing to go to in order to try to build a streaming ad business. Smaller brands that sell on Amazon often don’t have the money or expertise to make video commercials, and that typically makes... Read more ›
9
Earlier Tuesday, we published this year’s edition of The Information 50, our annual list of startups to watch. The list is intended as a guide to companies that haven’t yet broken through, but bear watching as candidates for future public listings or big-ticket acquisitions. Our task was complicated this year by the downturn in startup funding: Venture capitalists completed fewer deals in the third quarter than in any quarter in... Read more ›
17
On Tuesday, we released The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups, an annual list where we select companies that have the potential to be the most valuable businesses in their sectors based on our reporting, including their revenue and growth prospects. The 50 companies we selected have raised less than $100 million in funding or started operations in the last two years. All are valued at less than $1 billion. The... Read more ›
5
As Amazon gears up to run ads on its Prime Video streaming service early next year, company executives are asking advertisers to commit to spending significant amounts of money on the service in 2024. The requests, which ad executives say are more aggressive than what Netflix asked for when it launched an ad-tier last year, signify Amazon’s confidence in the advertising prospects of Prime Video. In meetings with one big... Read more ›
13
Late last year, around the time ChatGPT became a global sensation, the engineers at OpenAI began working on a new artificial intelligence model, codenamed Arrakis. Although OpenAI was preparing to boost ChatGPT with a different model, now known as GPT-4, which it had completed earlier in the year, the upcoming Arrakis model would allow the company to run the chatbot less expensively. Success with Arrakis would also help OpenAI show... Read more ›
0
When staff working on Google’s ChatGPT rival, Bard, hear from managers that they need to work at “Bard speed,” they know it means moving much faster than they were accustomed to in other parts of the company. Legal reviews of new features can start and end in a day. A feature that might have taken a quarter to prepare in the past now gets done in a week.For a company... Read more ›
0
It’s been a particularly tough year for startups. Venture funding is on pace for the lowest annual total since 2019, according to the PitchBook-National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor. Silicon Valley Bank, an important cog in the startup finance machine, failed in March. One-time high-fliers such as Jasper AI, Hopin and Flexport have been humbled or shuttered. That’s unless, of course, the startup is working in generative artificial intelligence, where... Read more ›
2
Greycroft, a New York venture capital firm that has backed Bumble, Venmo and Axios, is laying off five investors, the firm confirmed, after it failed to reach fundraising targets earlier this year. It’s also backing away from healthcare and fintech investing. The firm disclosed in April that it had raised a total of $980 million for two new funds, about 40% less than its initial target set in early 2022.... Read more ›
0
Whatever job security existed in tech appears to have disappeared. On Monday, LinkedIn said it was cutting 668 people, the third round of layoffs at the Microsoft-owned unit this year. Meanwhile, developer forum Stack Overflow said Monday it would cut its staff by 28%—which, according to the Verge, amounts to 100 jobs. And that’s just today: late last week, Flexport cut 20% of its staff, or 660 people, following a... Read more ›
2
The Israel-Hamas war that erupted over the past week has been a test of social media companies’ ability to handle content moderation in a crisis. In Europe, it’s also been a chance for the European Commission to flex its muscle under the Digital Services Act for the first time. Over the past week, Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market, has sent strongly worded letters to X and... Read more ›
20
High-profile venture capitalists, including Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and Sequoia Capital partner Ravi Gupta, are withdrawing from a major gathering of tech leaders after conference CEO Paddy Cosgrave made comments that appear to refer to Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Hamas-controlled Gaza as “war crimes.” At least five speakers said they would no longer participate at the November Web Summit conference, which draws tens of thousands of founders and executives to... Read more ›
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29.11.2024 15:58
Last update: 15:51 EDT.
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